Procurement and Civic Innovation

Have you ever used a government website and had a not-so-awesome experience? In our slick 2014 world of Google, Twitter and Facebook, why does government tech feel like it’s stuck in the 1990s?

The culprit: bad technology procurement.

Procurement is the procedure a government follows to buy something–letting suppliers know what they want, asking for proposals, restricting what kinds of proposal they will consider, limiting what kinds of firms they will do business with, and deciding if what they got what they paid for.

The City of Chicago buys technology about the same way that they buy health insurance, a bridge, or anything else in between. And that’s the problem.

Chicago’s government has a long history of corruption, nepotism and patronage. After each outrage, new rules are piled upon existing rules to prevent that crisis from happening again.
Unfortunately, this accumulation of rules does not just protect against the bad guys, it also forms a huge barrier to entry for technology innovators.

So, the firms that end up building our city’s digital public services tend to be good at picking their way through the barriers of the procurement process, not at building good technology. Instead of making government tech contracting fair and competitive, procurement has unfortunately had the opposite effect.

So where does this leave us? Despite Chicago’s flourishing startup scene, and despite having one of the country’s largest community of civic technologists, the Windy City’s digital public services are still terribly designed and far too expensive to the taxpayer.

The Technology Gap

The best way to see the gap between Chicago’s volunteer civic tech community and the technology that the City pays is to look at an entire class of civic apps that are essentially facelifts on existing government websites.

CrimeAround.us by Eric van Zanten (disclaimer: Eric works for us at DataMade and we are currently building up this app in partnership with LISC Chicago)

You may have noticed an increase in quality and usability between these three civic apps and their official government counterparts.

Now consider this: all of the government sites took months to build and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Was My Car Towed, 2nd City Zoning and CrimeAround.us were all built by one to two people in a matter of days, for no money.

Think about that for a second. Consider how much the City is overpaying for websites its citizens can barely use. And imagine how much better our digital city services would be if the City worked with the very same tech startups they’re trying to nurture.

It’s mostly for fun, learning, and a sense of civic duty, but it demonstrates there’s no shortage of highly skilled developers who are interested in using technology to make their city a better place to live in.

So what happens when civic-minded developers try to work directly for the City? Funny you should ask…

After reading all 152 pages of the document, we realized we had no chance of getting the bid. It was impossible for the ChicagoLobbyists.org group to meet the legal requirements (as it would have been for any small software shop):

audited financial statements for the past 3 years

an economic disclosure statement (EDS) and affidavit

proof of $500k workers compensation and employers liability

proof of $2 million in professional liability insurance

Procurement at work

The City ended up awarding the contract to Crowe Horwath LLP, an audit, tax, advisory, risk, and performance services firm—everything but a web shop, really. This is the same vendor that built the City’s official city website under Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Yep—you have to know what lobbyist you want to look up before you can see what they’ve been up to.

Never mind the irony that we had built ChicagoLobbyists.org for the City of Chicago’s own hackathon event. Never mind that our code was open source, so the vendor could simply have taken it and built on it – with our blessing. But to top it off, the delivered product was tragically unusable.

This is the system as it currently exists. The City can only buy things through the procurement process, and Crowe Horwath LLP’s was likely the best bid they got. And folks at the city were very responsive when we wrote a post-mortem blog post outlining our concerns. But that doesn’t change the fact that this was a dead end for us.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve since started my own open data consultancy, DataMade. We’ve never competed to work on a City of Chicago project, and never plan to while this procurement system exists in its current state. We simply can’t commit the hundreds of hours required to respond to those hundred-page RFPs—how many small businesses could?